*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do *** This kind of thing just blows my mind. How in the heck can it not be legal for someone to put the text laws onlinein the U.S.? Steven Clift Democracies Online From: http://www.uniontrib.com/news/nation/20010513-9999_1n13own.html civic.com Changing the world. By Kathryn Balint UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER May 13, 2001 Who owns the law? Not the public, at least in the latest court battle over copyright infringement on the Internet. Turns out, the text of the public laws in question belongs to a private, but influential, organization. That's what a federal judge and an appeals court say. This is one online copyright infringement lawsuit that promises to affect more lives than the record industry's high-profile dispute with Napster's music-sharing service. Government at the local, state and federal levels increasingly is enacting laws that have been written and copyrighted by private entities. Consider: California and 47 other states have building laws that are copyrighted by one of three nonprofit organizations. The federal government requires U.S. physicians to use a medical billing code that's owned by the American Medical Association. The National Fire Protection Association's 900-page electrical code is in force, in one form or another, in all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and Guam. "By its very nature, the law belongs to the public," said Malla Pollack, associate professor of law at Northern Illinois University. "For some reason, the U.S. courts do not seem to take seriously the public domain." The question of who owns the law arose from a homespun Web site operated out of Denison, Texas, a little more than an hour's drive from Dallas. It started when retired airline pilot Peter Veeck, 60, set out to renovate a dilapidated building in downtown Denison. He paid $300 for a copy of the region's building code, 1,000 pages of construction laws that dictate everything from how wide a door must be to how far apart nails must be spaced. Veeck -- "it rhymes with wreck," he says, borrowing a line from late White Sox owner Bill Veeck -- figured he'd do everyone a favor and post the building code on his Web site. No sooner did he get the code up on the Net than he received a threatening e-mail from a lawyer. The lawyer claimed a nonprofit group by the name of the Southern Building Code Congress International Inc. owned the copyright to that set of laws. "Copyright?" Veeck asked. "How can you have a copyright on the law? I was brought up in school to believe the law was public domain." Veeck hired attorney Eric Weisberg, who thought the case would be a slam dunk. "As far as I'm concerned," Weisberg recalls telling his client, "there can't be a copyright of the law." That was three years ago. Since then, a federal judge and two out of three judges sitting on an appeals panel have ruled that a private organization can, and does, own the copyright to the local building laws. "It's counterintuitive," Weisberg said. "It's outrageous." Not to Robert J. Veal, who represents the Southern Building Code Congress. He said his client has been ripped off every bit as much as the music recording companies that are suing Napster. "It's all the same," Veal said. "They've done the creative work, and now someone says, 'I ought to be able to take it because it's there.' " -- end clip -- *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
